Description: Aspiring super-villain Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) wants to join the Evil League of Evil and win the girl of his dreams, but his nemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), stops him at every turn in this three-part musical.
No idea why it would occur to anyone to make this, but it is cool. I especially liked the Commodore references (my first computer was a Commodore 64). The music is kind of haunting.
Free Exchange discusses a piece by Martin Feldstein and Mark Thoma gives his two cents.
Martin Feldstein: The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works." To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.
In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it. The existence of such a program in the United States would not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as "too expensive."
Free Exchange: The . . . problem with the argument by rationing is that it seems to ignore how resources are allocated in a perfectly free market—by willingness or ability to pay. . .
The nub of the matter is this—government can afford to provide basic coverage to everyone, but it can't afford to provide every treatment everyone may want to everyone who wants it. It must therefore decide how to limit its expenses, and it can leave open the option of using a private practitioner to those who are denied care based on a cost-benefit analysis. Or government can provide coverage to no one, and those who cannot afford a treatment—effective or not—will go without.
Mark Thoma: The goal of Democrats is to lower costs without sacrificing the quality of care (which will allow coverage to be expanded). Whether that's achievable or not is a legitimate point to debate, I think the experience in other countries suggests there's quite a bit of excess in the system that can be removed without affecting the quality of care people receive, but accusing Democrats of intending to cut the quality of care or to ration care within particular segments of the population (or overall) mischaracterizes what they are trying to achieve.
I'm the first to admit that 99% of gun owners (I obviously made that number up) are law-abiding citizens and that people who have concealed weapons permits don't typically cause problems (I am not aware of any cases). I think that much if not most of the gun control debate is based on people's emotional response to guns. It's based more on the disgust reflex than anything logical.
Gun-control activists find the presence of guns distasteful and bad for the kind of cultural environment they want to foster. The fact that they hold on to support for gun control laws even though they don't affect crime rates doesn't mean they are stupid. It's the disgust reflex. They just don't like the thought of everyone packing heat when they go to the grocery store.
Gun enthusiasts see "keeping and bearing arms" as an important part of their cultural identity, and are driven mad by the idea of latte-sipping yuppies looking judgmentally at their lifestyle. Even the LDS church's gun-control policies/positions occasionally provoke the ire of the NRA crowd (No guns in chapels, Temple Square, BYU campus, etc.).
Bringing a gun to a public rally or, to an extent, getting a concealed carry permit are ways of making a statement against our modern sanitized, suburban sensibilities. I think it's analogous to homosexuals parading around in thongs or engaging in obnoxious public displays of affection. Both are frustrated that much of society looks at their way of life with suspicion (at best), and they want to make a public statement that tests the limits of constitutional and statutory tolerance for their lifestyle.
The key quotes from the video, in my view, are "Our forefathers fought for the right to keep and bear arms and that everybody should be armed." and "The question is, why don't people bear arms these days." (both around 2:30).
I don't really know where I stand on the gun issues, but it is really interesting to watch.
Interesting perspective to keep in mind. It reminds me that I need to read up more on the public option, as it appears that I am not as "up" on it as I thought (I was under the impression that all of the federal employees would be put on the public plan, giving it a big initial pool . . . not sure where I got that.). And, of course, Nudge is a very fun read and highly recommended.
. . . So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- theseare "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes forYouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests. . .
Good article. It made me grateful that stuff like this isn't taught over the pulpit in General Conference any more (Sorry about the cheezy source. lds.org only has archives back to the late '70s).
No matter what Beck says, he's trying to scare people with talk of eugenics. Trying to brush it off later and say that the discussion is relevant because Nazi Germany started cutting health care to handicapped people because of budget constraints and that the U.S. will too is, frankly, idiotic. The supremacy of the "master race" and the elimination of "undesirables" is a fairly central doctrine. It had nothing to do with budget constraints. The Germans were taking over the world at the time. There was plenty of money/resources.
Also, can we please stop portraying Nazism as a "left-wing" political movement? There is of course the slight issue that Hitler arrested and killed left-wingers (communists, socialists) along with all the other dissidents who opposed his policies. But more broadly, most if not all comprehensive moral philosophies (political, religious, social, whatever) have a sort of built-in totalitarian/dictatorial instinct that tries to force people to conform to it. This is why liberal institutions (like separation of powers, referenda, direct election of representatives, civilian control of the military, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc.) are so important.
It's interesting to me that Beck justifies the whole thing based on the assertion that it is likely that the Federal Government is in danger of defaulting on the national debt (through hyper inflation). First of all, Large deficits are desirable during recessions. Once we have a recovery, taxes need to be raised and spending needs to be cut. If Congress can't/won't do this, we have a problem. As of right now, this doomsday scenario doesn't seem likely if interest rates on government debt mean anything.
I feel like I say this a lot (probably too much for someone as young and inexperienced as I am), but there are intelligent reasons to oppose the kind of health care reform being portrayed (Megan McArdle makes some especially good arguments and links to many others). Familiarize yourself with what credible people have to say before you make a up your mind.
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